Brocade Acquisition Adds New Piece to New IP Puzzle

At Mobile World Congress this week in Barcelona, Brocade Communications Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: BRCD) took another step toward making it easier for mobile operators to meet the growing demands of providing M2M and IoT connectivity. On Monday, the company announced its plans to acquire Connectem, which delivers virtual evolved packet core (vEPC) solutions that allow mobile operators to take advantage of the New IP virtualized operating environment to build flexible, scalable packet cores.

"Connectem has been on Brocade's radar for some time," Kevin Shatzkamer, CTO of Mobile Networking at Brocade, told The New IP via phone from Barcelona. In addition to being an early investor in the company, Brocade also played an observatory role on the board, he said.

Brocade has been focused on helping service providers accelerate the transition to the New IP through the integration of software-defined networking and network functions virtualization (NFV) into their infrastructure. "In the evolution from physical to virtual there is a disaggregation that gives new vendors license to play in the LTE areas," said Shatzkamer. "The traditional model of lifting your software off your physical appliance and dropping it into a virtual machine fails to take advantage of the recognition that a virtualized environment creates an opportunity to fundamentally rethink how you build software."

The acquisition of Connectem is another key component of Brocade's strategy, complementing the acquisitions of Vyatta, Vistapointe and the recently announced SteelApp virtual ADC product line from Riverbed. "This is almost the final piece of being able to put together an end-to-end story for mobile," said Shatzkamer. (See Brocade to Acquire Connectem for Virtual Mobile Networking .)

When it was founded in 2011, Connectem "envisioned the power of general purpose computing as applied to mobile infrastructure even before NFV was a buzzword," said Nishi Kant, CEO of Connectem. "Our idea was to decouple the thinking" of the relationship between hardware and functions," he said. "In a modern data network, you need to think software. We thought of what users were trying to do end-to-end and came up with an architecture that supports that kind of scale."

Initially, Brocade will focus deployment of the Connectem solutions on use cases around M2M and Tier 2 and Tier 3 MVNOs, said Shatzkamer."That is our day-one strategy to use as learning opportunity and increase our deployment competency."

Deploying New IP networks and services requires not only a new way of thinking but also a new way of building platforms and services, and getting there is not easy, especially when it comes to orchestration.